Facilitating implementation of actionable solutions for climate adaptation of regions and local authorities

Background and Purpose

The EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change has, over recent years, funded more than 50 research and innovation projects generating a substantial body of knowledge on how regions and cities can adapt to climate change. The problem is that producing knowledge and actually getting it used are two very different things. Decision-makers at regional and local level — the people who most need actionable guidance — are often unaware of what exists, unable to access it in their own language, or unsure how to translate research findings into concrete local action. This call directly addresses that gap, acting as a follow-up to the REGILIENCE-plus project, with the explicit goal of ensuring that the right solutions reach the right people at the right time.

What the Call Is Asking For

The funded project must systematically harvest and assess solutions emerging from Mission-funded projects, but also from broader Horizon Europe programmes and relevant national initiatives. These solutions must then be structured into a detailed, user-friendly inventory, organised around the Mission Implementation Plan's key community systems and enabling conditions, so that regional and local authorities can immediately understand what a given solution involves, what it costs, how it can be financed, and what barriers or enablers they are likely to encounter. Critically, the inventory must be built to enable replication — not just to document what has been done elsewhere.

Reaching Local Authorities Where They Are

A central requirement is multilingual accessibility. Solutions must be made available in local languages, recognising that many regional and local decision-makers across Europe cannot easily engage with English-language research outputs. The project should proactively promote solutions to authorities already signed up to the Mission Charter or involved in Mission projects, and may also provide direct know-how support to help authorities develop and implement solutions in their specific local and climatic contexts. The target audience is not researchers — it is practitioners.

Feeding Back into Policy

Beyond its direct service to local authorities, the project is also expected to identify good practices that carry broader policy implications, feeding findings back into EU, national, and regional policy cycles. This "feedback to policy" function ensures that lessons learned on the ground can inform the next generation of EU climate adaptation policy, including the upcoming European Climate Adaptation Plan.

Collaboration Architecture

Given its coordination and support nature, the project's success depends heavily on how well it connects with the wider Mission ecosystem. Formal collaboration with the Mission Secretariat and the Mission Implementation Platform is mandatory, with a Memorandum of Understanding to be signed as early as possible after project start. National Hubs — set up under earlier Horizon calls — are key dissemination partners, ensuring that information is not only translated linguistically but also contextualised for national realities. The project should additionally build on existing inventories and analyses produced by initiatives such as NetworkNature+, RESIST, and REGILIENCE-plus, rather than starting from scratch.

Timeline and Legacy

The project is expected to run until the end of 2030, aligned with the Mission's own timeframe. This long duration is deliberate: sustained, ongoing dissemination is valued over a one-off knowledge dump. By the end, the project should have ensured a durable legacy for the knowledge created across the entire Mission portfolio — making sure that what was learned does not disappear when individual project contracts close.

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